Raquela

by Ruth Gruber

Anger and sorrow at the loss of the Old City tore through the Cyprus camps.

  “If we were there!” Some of the men beat their fists in the air. “We’re eleven thousand young men who could be fighting! We might have saved the Old City!”

  The refugees, moving in mobs, brandished sticks at the British soldiers in the watchtowers. Raquela saw their anger turn to violence; their frustration, to hostility and rage.

  Each night a handful of men escaped through the tunnels where trusted Cypriots drove them to little fishing boats waiting in Famagusta and Larnaca. They sailed to Haifa and from the dock went instantly into battle. But most of the men were trapped in the furnacelike huts and tents of the May inferno.

  On every front the newborn state was battling for its life. In the south and west the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal, cutting the Negev off from northern Israel and driving on to Tel Aviv.

  In the north the Syrians and Lebanese, and the Iraqi Arab Liberation Army, led by the pro-Nazi Fawzi el-Kaukji, marched across the Galilee, attacking the kibbutzim.

  From the east King Abdullah’s Arab League crossed the Jordan, and now, along with the Iraqis, they battled for the cities on the West Bank and, most of all, for Jerusalem.

  Word came on Gad’s radio. New Jerusalem was on starvation rations of food, water, fuel, and ammunition. Yet, one hundred thousand Jerusalemites and units of the Israel Army were still holding off the soldiers of the Arab Legion.

  The road to Jerusalem, the single lifeline from Tel Aviv, was immobilized; the Arab Legion, steamrolling from the towns they captured on the West Bank, surrounded Latrun, in the foothills of the Jerusalem corridor.

  To save Jerusalem, a secret road was built through a steep wadi. Mickey Marcus, an American Jew and a West Point graduate, who had flown over to help the fledgling state, planned the road. Hundreds of elderly men built it in the darkness, carrying sacks of dirt on their backs. The old “Murder Road” harassed by Arabs was bypassed; on the new road of dirt and gravel, dubbed the “Burma Road,” trucks from Tel Aviv, raising clouds of dust, reached Jerusalem just as it was down to its last two days of bread and flour.

  The siege of Jerusalem was over.

  In New York the UN Security Council was meeting in endless sessions. Some of the members sought earnestly to arrange a ceasefire, but so long as the Arabs were winning, the Security Council failed to reach agreement.

  Now the Arab offensive began slowing down; kibbutzniks were hurling Molotov cocktails at Arab tanks trying to conquer the kibbutzim. The tanks blew up; the men inside, if they were lucky, jumped out and ran away. Most were burned to death.

  Information that the Jews were going on the offensive reached New York. The Security Council agreed to a four-week cease-fire. It would last from June 11 to July 9.

  It gave both sides a breathing spell. Instructed by the UN to do nothing during the truce to improve their positions, both sides paid no attention. They regrouped their forces and brought in more arms.

  Mickey Marcus, tragically killed by one of his own sentries who mistook him for an enemy when he walked out of his tent one night, was flown to the United States and buried with full military honors at West Point. Colonel Moshe Dayan accompanied the body, and then rushed home.

  Golda Meir barnstormed America describing the war; she raised fifty million dollars.

  Golda’s dollars bought arms and planes from the only country willing to supply the new state: Czechoslovakia. Local pilots, like Ezer Weizmann, who had fought with the RAF—the Royal Air Force—in World War II and volunteers from abroad ferried the planes and armaments to Israel.

  The Arabs bolstered their numbers and planned their strategy of attack to be used as soon as the cease-fire ended.

  And Bevin relented a little.

  He made a new announcement; all refugees—except men of military age—could leave the camps.

  The joy at being freed was poisoned. But Britain, Bevin explained, must remain evenhanded. They could not allow Jewish soldiers to create an imbalance.

  Imbalance! Raquela shook her head in disbelief. Fifty million Arabs against fewer than a million Jews was no imbalance. But eleven thousand young men of military age might tip the scales.

  The Pan York and the Pan Crescent were freed. They would begin ferrying the refugees, all except men of military age.

  Gad sent Raquela a message. “Can you come at once? We’re sailing today.”

  She switched shifts and rushed to the ship.

  Lines of women and children and old people—erstwhile prisoners of the Empire—overflowed the dock. Many were sobbing or staring blankly ahead.

  A woman carrying a baby stood forlornly. Raquela approached her.

  “They’re separating us.” The young mother’s eyes were flecked with fear. “God knows when I’ll see my husband again.”

  Raquela put her arm around the frightened woman’s shoulder. “They can’t keep the men here forever. You’ll see; he’ll join you soon in Israel.”

  Raquela looked up at the two ships. Some of the happiest hours of her life had been spent aboard the Pan York.

  But it was no longer the Pan York. Fresh white paint spelled out its new name: KOMEMIYUT, a Hebrew word for “independence.” The Pan Crescent had become the Atzmaut, another word for “independence.”

  On each ship Palmach sailors unfurled the blue and white flag of Israel and hoisted it to the top of the masthead. On the dock the people lifted their faces to the flags and sang “Hatikvah.” The minute they set foot on the ships, they would be on the soil of Israel.

  Raquela climbed the gangway of the Komemiyut and hurried to the bridge. Gad, dressed in summer whites, every inch the commander, was bending over charts, talking to his first mate, giving orders to his bosun. Raquela waited.

  At last he looked up. “Raquela!”

  He pressed her into his arms. “I thought they’d give us a little notice. That we’d have at least one last evening together. But the moment word came to sail, all hell broke loose.”

  “Will you be coming back?” she whispered.

  “We’ll keep making the run to Haifa until we get everyone out of here.”

  “Even the young men?”

  His handsome face grew sober. “As soon as they’re released. Would you believe this?”

  He showed her a document. “Its the bill of health the British gave us to clear out. Read it.”

  She read: “The flag flown by this vessel is not recognized by the British Government.”

  She laughed. “Will Bevin never give up? His government still hasn’t recognized the state of Israel.”

  The first mate waited anxiously for Gad. The people were already lining the decks.

  “Good-bye, Gad.”

  “Good-bye, my darling.”

  She hurried down the gangway.

  In the hospital Raquela worked feverishly, delivering the babies of women too close to term to risk sailing. By now twenty-five hundred babies had been born on Cyprus.

  Gad returned every few days. But they had only minutes together. The moment the ships hove into sight, the lines of women, children, and old men queued up to board.

  A few young men managed to hoodwink the British officers at the checkout table. Some dressed as women with wigs borrowed from Orthodox women; some lined their faces with black-crayon wrinkles; some had fake casts on their legs; some wore dental overlays to look like toothless old men.

  A few hundred escaped and made their way to Israel to join the army. But most of the eleven thousand young men watched the long processions file out of the camps; they were lonely, bitter, enraged. The camps took on the air of an all-male prison, like the male sections of Hitler’s concentration camps. The women and children had made internment tolerable. Now, in Bevin’s final anti-Semitic stroke, he inflicted the last indignity, the one act that conjured up death: separation. Separating them from the wives who had survived the Holocaust, or the new wives they had found and married in the camps, separating them from the babies who had giv
en them back their manhood.

  The four-week truce continued; so long as there was no war, Gad and Ike could ferry the people safely to Haifa.

  The day came—a day, in early July, so hot it blistered the huts—when Raquela got word. “Come quickly. This is my last trip.”

  On the bridge Gad looked drained.

  “Others will finish cleaning out Cyprus. They’re sending Ike and me to Europe to reoutfit our ships. From now on we’ll be sailing back and forth from Naples with refugees from the DP camps and thousands of other Jews pouring into Naples from all over Europe.”

  Already she felt a sense of loss.

  He seemed to understand. “This is not good-bye, Raquela. I’ll come to Jerusalem. I’ll find you wherever you are.”

  She clung to him. Would Arab planes bomb him? Would Arab submarines slide through the waters and rip his ship apart?

  “I’ll come back, Raquela.” They kissed passionately.

  He walked her to the gangway and stood watching her descend.

  On the dock she turned around. She waved. “Good-bye, Gad.” She looked at the handsome captain.

  Would she ever see him again?

  A few days later, her replacement arrived. She boarded the plane for Haifa.

  TWENTY

  JULY 1948

  The engines revved, and within minutes the plane rolled down the Nicosia airstrip.

  Cyprus fell away; below lay the Mediterranean, turquoise in the morning sun. In an hour Raquela would be landing in Haifa.

  The plane flew smoothly through the blue cloudless sky, but Raquela’s mind was in turmoil. Who was she? What did she want of life?

  Love. Fulfillment. Fulfillment as a woman. Fulfillment in the field she had chosen.

  Marriage? Yes. She wanted a man to hold her in his arms. She wanted marriage and her own children. But marriage to whom? Gad, or Arik? Does every young woman, she wondered, discover herself through the eyes of the men who love her? For she was beginning to see herself as the two men saw her.

  Gad made her aware of her sexuality, of herself as a passionate and warm-blooded woman. Arik made her proud of her career—life-loving, life-giving, life-nurturing. Under his tutelage she would move to the top of her profession. Arik, too, made her aware that she was a desirable woman.

  Married to Gad, she would probably have to move to Haifa, waiting and watching for his ship to come in. Her life with him would be like the sea that was his life—uncertain, stormy, with days of great beauty and calm, and weeks, maybe months, of loneliness. A life forever fraught with danger.

  As the wife of a sea captain in Haifa, she would be the outsider. Her roots, her background, everyone she loved, was in Jerusalem. The city was almost human, like a beloved person in her life.

  Were her feelings for Gad strong enough to overcome her apprehensions?

  Married to Arik—she would live in Jerusalem. She would work at his side. She would never be alone; he would be her constant companion.

  Arik’s life was the life she knew and had loved before Cyprus. It would be more serene, more even-keeled, than Gad’s. Did she love Arik enough to compensate for the excitement that Gad stirred within her?

  The plane landed in Haifa. A sign greeted her:

  WELCOME TO ISRAEL

  Israeli soldiers guarded the airport. Israeli officials sped her through Immigration. Israeli customs men inspected her suitcase. She wanted to fling out her arms and embrace them. She was home. In Israel. And the British were gone.

  On the street corners of the broad main avenue the old name, Kingsway, had been changed. The street signs, in Hebrew and English, bore the words REHOV ATZMAUT—“Street of Independence.” Even the air seemed to breathe the word “independence.”

  She walked past shipping offices and small warehouses until she found the office of the Jewish Agency.

  A young man glanced up from a cluttered desk. “What can I do for you, miss?”

  “Can you tell me—is Captain Gad of the Komemiyut in Haifa?”

  He looked at her. “He sailed an hour ago for Naples.”

  Raquela taxied to the Street of Independence and pulled up at a curb where an intercity sherut waited with a sign on its windshield: TO TEL AVIV. She climbed into the front seat of the seven-passenger cab. It filled up almost immediately; the driver turned the ignition key, stepped on the gas, and maneuvered his way through the port city.

  Circling the harbor, Raquela saw the graveyard of “illegal” ships and the famous American steamboat, the Exodus 1947. “The Mayflowers of our State,” Dr. Weizmann had called them.

  Soon the white stone houses of Haifa and the biblical Carmel Mountains lay behind them; they were driving along the Mediterranean coast.

  Raquela looked out the window as army trucks and jeeps filled with Israeli soldiers rolled by. In some of them the men were singing Palmach songs; they waved to the people in the sherut. She waved back, her joy tinged with apprehension. The truce was holding, but the soldiers made her realize the war was far from over.

  “Shelanu!” The driver pointed proudly to the soldiers.

  “Ours.” That’s the word, she thought. Our soldiers. Our cities. Our country. No longer owned by the Turks. No longer ruled by the British. Ours.

  The road suddenly looked familiar; it was the crossroad to Athlit.

  She turned to the driver. “Do you know if all the refugees are out—if Athlit has been closed?”

  “But of course. As soon as the state was born. They’re citizens already. The first act of our Provisional Council of State was to end all restrictions on immigration.”

  She stared straight ahead. Athlit was closed, but not Cyprus. Judith Steiner’s brother, Joseph, and all the able-bodied men who had been imprisoned in Athlit were probably in the army. In a few days, on July 9, the truce would end. Unless the Security Council could prolong the cease-fire, the war would erupt again on every front.

  Arriving in Tel Aviv, Raquela was stunned. She discovered there was no passenger traffic to Jerusalem: only convoys of jeeps led by the UN or the International Red Cross were allowed to make the journey. She sat on a café veranda on Allenby Road, sipping iced coffee, trying to figure out how to get home.

  All around her Tel Aviv shrieked, honked its horns, ground its brakes. On terraces women beat their carpets with a rat-tat-tat like machine-gun fire. It was nearly noon. The sun beat fiercely on the concrete street. Yet the Tel Avivians moved along urgently, purposefully, carrying briefcases or newspapers under their arms.

  How different our three big cities are, she thought, still worrying how to get transport to Jerusalem. Haifa is a morning city—workers hurrying to their jobs in the harbor, the factories, the oil refineries. Tel Aviv is high noon, the city of frenzied commerce and even more frenzied traffic. Jerusalem is the sunset city. Jerusalem is the eternal “going home.” Every trip to Jerusalem is a pilgrimage, a going up, a return. Jerusalem is my city. But how am I to get there?

  She was beginning to panic. An army jeep drove slowly down Allenby Road. From the cafe veranda she caught sight of the driver, an officer in uniform. “Ze’ev,” she called out. He was a good friend of her brother Jacob’s.

  He stopped the jeep.

  She ran down the stairs to greet him. “Can you help me?” she said. “I’ve got to get up to Jerusalem.”

  “Hop in,” he said. “I’m just on my way.”

  “God, Ze’ev. Somebody up there sent you to me.”

  She ran back for her suitcase. Ze’ev tossed it in the back of his jeep and helped her climb up into the high front seat.

  Soon they had joined a convoy of jeeps at the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Ze’ev, preoccupied, hardly spoke as they drove along the coastal plain through Jewish settlements, vineyards, and fruit orchards. A few miles before the approach to Latrun—the police-station roadblock from which Israel had failed to dislodge the Arabs—the convoy swerved onto a dirt road.

  It was the “Burma Road”—the road that had been built at night, the secret l
ifeline that had broken the siege and saved Jerusalem. Our road, she thought.

  It was steep and unpaved, winding through a wadi along the foot of the hills.

  The line of jeeps churned up a cloud of dirt and dust. Her hair, her face, her clothes, were covered with dust. She smiled, even as the dust entered her nostrils. Our dust. Our dirt.

  Near Bab-el-wad—the Gate of the Valley—they drove past coils of barbed wire. The “Burma Road” ended. They turned sharply left back to the old highway she knew. They were beginning the ascent, climbing the ancient Hills of Judea, the steep hills the Arabs had controlled during the winter war that had begun in November 1947.

  Now the road was safe; the Arabs, defeated, had run away. But the sides of the road were a monument to war, a cemetery of burned-out trucks and cars that had failed to reach Jerusalem.

  They drove past the village of Abu Ghosh, whose Arabs had chosen to stay with the Jews, past fertile kibbutzim in the hills, winding through the hills to the crest. Jerusalem lay ahead. Raquela could see its skyline. Her breath was short.

  Separated from the convoy, they were driving now down Jaffa Road. She knew every shop, every kiosk, every house. The signs of war were everywhere; glass and rubble littered the streets. She saw gaping holes in stone buildings, and pockmarks where bullets had entered. Some of the buildings were stained ugly black from fires. But the city of stone had withstood the shelling.

  A few women walked quickly, carrying string bags through which she could see a loaf of bread or a tomato and a cucumber.

  The jeep drove up Ben Yehuda Street. She saw the bombed-out Vilenchik Building, the collapsed Amdursky Hotel, the apartment building where Esther’s family had lived. The buildings looked like London in the blitz.

  “I have to drop something in an office,” Ze’ev told her. “If you can wait a few minutes, I’ll take you home. You’d have a hard time trying to find a cab. Gasoline is harder to get than…than blood.”

  “Of course I’ll wait.”

  He returned in a few minutes and drove toward Bet Hakerem. The early-afternoon traffic was light; it was siesta time. Did people still take siestas these hectic days?